


Grenade

by omphale23



Category: Chasing Rainbows
Genre: Community: ds_snippets, Gen, Snippets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-14
Updated: 2010-03-14
Packaged: 2017-10-08 00:13:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/70716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks to <a href="http://lamentables.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://lamentables.livejournal.com/"><b>lamentables</b></a> for her able beta assistance.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Grenade

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://lamentables.livejournal.com/profile)[**lamentables**](http://lamentables.livejournal.com/) for her able beta assistance.

He writes letters, asks his mother if winter has hit, tells her he won't be home by Christmas, apologizes for ending up here in the cold. Still it won't snow. It only sleets, miserable pins and needles of water, bullets. Burning metal and freezing rain.

Finally, after endless weeks of frost and the wind that bites around corners and swirls the few remaining leaves into his bedroll, winter follows the cold.

In late December, it snows for the first time.

Jake isn't surprised. How could he be, when the weather has shifted to frozen numbness, when every morning he wakes early and crashes his way through the ice sheeting over puddles in the bottom of the trench.

What surprises him is how quiet everything becomes. The soft silence wakes him in the middle of the night, and while he's shivering and catching his breath he hears that the guns have stopped. That the crackle of rifles has slowed, and around it folds the smothering lack of noise that comes with inches of snow over everything sitting still.

He goes to look, because the sentries are too quiet, because quiet sounds like death and it makes him twitch. He goes to look because he needs to know what's going on, even if it gets his head blown off.

The sentries are fine, curled into each other for comfort and blinking out over the edge of the outpost. Jake turns away from them and hesitates, skittish and waiting for something, anything, to break the creeping calm of the night.

The bodies strung in No Man's Land look even more like ghosts, bedrock for drifts of snow pale as loss. Jake pulls out a grenade and pitches it toward the German lines. He waits, and when it explodes the world starts up again.


End file.
